A business process consists of a sequence of steps executed by a human or a system to accomplish a business objective. Examples of business process include Expense Report Approval, Claims Processing, Service Request Resolution, etc. Traditionally, business processes have been an analysis exercise with intent to understand and document current business processes. These business processes were usually documented on paper or at best simulated using a set of assumptions. The business processes were not directly executed and were typically defined by business analysts.
More recently, with the maturity of business process technology, execution of business processes using a business process engine has become possible. Such an execution of business processes has been typically enabled by software developers.
Today, most business process solutions are either targeted at business analysts or software developers. The solutions targeted at business analysts continue to at best result in simulation. This category of tools is usually referred to as Business Process Analysis tools. The solutions targeted at software developers lead to executable processes. However, these solutions typically provide a view that is very IT centric and cannot be modeled or easily understood by business analysts.
A few business process solutions exist that try to address the needs of both the business analysts and software developers. These solutions typically utilize two different tools with two different underlying models. In particular, the skeleton of the executable model is usually generated from the analyst model using one tool, and then the developer completes the executable model using a different tool. This approach of one-way generation makes iterations between business analysts and software developers difficult and does not provide business analysts with execution statistics within the context of their model. In addition, this approach requires translation between the two models, which is inefficient and results in fidelity loss when going from one model to the other.